Alexa is just another way to measure your website. It can be found at alexa.com. Some say its pointless but others swear by it. Personnally I like Alexa only because it goes to show how effective the content on your website is. Alexa takes into account five main metrics of … Read More

Alexa is innaccurate, at low traffic densities
From experience one of my sites, absolute trash, has high alexa rank.
This site is not active, used to develop and test experimental webware scripts, the code is bad many parts do not connect, the site has almost zero traffic, and it all … Read More

Alexa is just another way to measure your website. It can be found at alexa.com. Some say its pointless but others swear by it. Personnally I like Alexa only because it goes to show how effective the content on your website is. Alexa takes into account five main metrics of your website:
-# of visits on your website (new and returning visitors)
-# of pages visited on your website
-# of inbound links
-Quality and diversity of visits (this includes bounce rate and where your visitors come from)
-Time on site

I didn't include alexa reviews because they don't have the same weighting to your Alexa score that they did back pre-2013

By scoring higher in Alexa it helps as positive reinforcement that your website is producing content that is either keeping people coming back or engaging new audiences (or if you are renting traffic through PPC then atleast you know your ads are drawing people in). This is pretty valuable to know and by knowing which region they are coming from it acts also to help make sure that you are getting the traffic you want instead of just relying on Google.

The big downside to Alexa is although they are freemium; to get the actual Alexa widget on your website to work how you want it, it will cost you a subscription fee. Also without all of your visitors having the Alexa toolbar the results aren't as accurate as they could be.

Because of its inaccuracies I wouldnt recommend trusting Alexa by itself; instead using Alexa with Google webmaster tools & analytics, and MozRank you can atleast somewhat rely on the information you are recieving and help you to make the changes you need to optimize your website.

Alexa traffic can be used as competitive intelligence tool to see the marketing potential of a website. However, not everybody has alexa toolbar installed so even if you have a lot of traffic it can be hard to rank-up.

No, I don't think that Alexa ranking will decrease based on the site performance but increasing and decreasing capacity of Alexa depends on the over the traffic you are getting, if you have started getting bulk traffic then I would say your Alexa ranking will start improving while the traffic count start decreasing and your Alexa ranking will start increasing.

Well @PixelatedKarma I have read your post over and it looks like you are also discussing the same thing i.e. the traffic because if you are not getting traffic then you are not going to get page views....... anyway the think which has attracted me more is the links I didn't get that actually and I guess no one can comment more over it ! I don't think alexa ranking increases or decreases because of the links. Anyway as I am not that much sure about it, so it may be! I have been talking about this with some of my friends they all keep telling me that no its not about the links rather than its all about the traffic higher the traffic lesser will be the alexa and lesser the traffic higher will be the alexa.

@kelly, you can believe what you will. Yes the specifics of traffic do play a role, in fact do an experiment for me. Setup a macro script on a website you are monitoring to re-visit it once per day. Notice how your rank initially goes down but then suddenly you lose more then you gained? That's because Alexa needs to see the traffic specifics of a site to ensure you aren't gaming them (it goes beyond # of visits as posted above). Now try getting high quality traffic through the methods I've mentioned above, including inbound links from High alexa ranked sites ( top 100k), see how your rank goes down and stays down? Alexa has said themselves, that they take into account inbound links from sites they can see. Those are sites with the widget installed, sites which are frequented by individuals with the Alexa toolbar, and sites where the stats are publicly available.

Infact if you really don't believe me, please don't try it with any of your clients and please don't tell them about it. That way our clients can see the better result, especially the ones who want top dollar for their advertising space.

Also Kelly, yes your friends are in part right but they're wrong that it's just traffic. To tell someone to increase their visitors just to decrease their alexa rank isn't doing justice to that person. With all the ranking signals I mentioned above, if you can't accurately convey that to the person who is looking for alexa specific seo, you shouldn't be offering your advice or services to that person because end of the day you won't deliver the result they want. Infact if they paid for your services wanting lower alexa and you just told them "oh it's just all traffic", your company would eventually be labelled as one of the many snake oil, Jedi mind trick type of seos out there who are giving the industry a bad name.

Alexa is innaccurate, at low traffic densities
From experience one of my sites, absolute trash, has high alexa rank.
This site is not active, used to develop and test experimental webware scripts, the code is bad many parts do not connect, the site has almost zero traffic, and it all comes from a single ip.
The more traffic that hits a site, the better alexa reads the traffic,
active sites rank closer to proportion of what the server logs tell me against real traffic

Re: widget improves alexa rank
Install my advertising and I will tell people your site is better toonoconflict of interest there

@PixelatedKarma Your points really are compelling I will surely try your methods out. Actually I wasn't aware about the points which you just mentioned in detail all this time I was thinking that alexa is all about traffic and traffic nothing more. Thanks for the detailed description about what's actually going on over the back end I'll try experimenting the same by building a microsite and would let you know if your theory gets true.